In Matthew 27, Jesus hangs on the cross. He’s mocked and abused, and the whole scene is unbearably cruel, but the cruelest irony of all is that he is so alone. The one sent to gather the whole world into a community of love hangs on the cross and he hangs all alone.
His closest friends have betrayed him. Strangers walking by him and hanging beside him taunt him. Then for three hours, clouds cover the sun and a deep darkness falls. For three hours Jesus hangs on the cross, abandoned, in the dark. Finally, he ruptures the silence: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46).
It’s one of the most analyzed questions in history. What does it mean? What is Jesus experiencing? What is he really asking? Clearly, Jesus is not asking why God has failed to save him. He knows he must drink the cup; he knows there’s no escaping that cross alive. Rather, instead of asking why God has failed to save him, he’s asking why God has forsaken him. He’s asking why, in a moment of heinous cruelty, God is so silent. My God, my God—in my darkest hour, in the moment when I most need the smallest whisper—why are you so silent?
I know this question.
There was a time when I always asked God to save me. When something difficult happened, I asked God to pluck me out of the fire and pull me out of the mire and set my feet on safe, solid ground. And that’s a good, biblical prayer—God likes saving us. But I’ve learned that God has not promised to always save me. I understand that, instead, God has promised to always be with me. I understand there’s no getting out of life alive. So I’ve accepted these facts and no longer always ask God to save me or save others. Now, I always ask God to be with me and with others.
My grandfather died recently, and along the way I prayed many prayers for him. But at a certain point, I stopped always asking God to save him and started asking God to be with him. Don’t get me wrong—I wanted my grandfather to live to three hundred (sounded fair to me), but I understood he had lived a wonderful life, filled with love, and that life was now ending. So my prayer was that God would walk with him all the way to the end that is a new beginning.
Knowing we share this inevitable terminus, many of us have stopped expecting God to always save us. We’re not greedy. We’re not asking to get out of life alive. No—we’re just asking God to be with us, to give us strength and courage. We’re asking for the smallest whisper, the smallest hint, the smallest touch, the smallest reminder that though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us, so we need not be afraid.
So what do we do when we look up into the heavens, only asking for a whisper, and all we hear is silence?
Why do You stand afar off, O LORD?
Why do You hide Yourself in times of trouble? (Psalm 10:1)
You, O LORD, rule forever;
Your throne is from generation to generation.
Why do You forget us forever?
Why do You forsake us so long? (Lamentations 5:19-20)
I can endure the pain and the suffering and the relentless specter of evil, but the one thing I cannot endure for long is the godforsaken silence. Because there comes a point at which reality is too much to bear and faith becomes nonsense if God cannot be bothered to be mindful enough of our frail frame to do something, anything really, to remind us he is there and with us and for us.
Years ago in a class, I was forced to read a novel (obscure at the time, but no longer since it was made into a movie) by an author whose name I could not pronounce. Procrastination had entrapped me, and I picked up the book and began reading it under a severe time crunch, expecting to skim it enough to fake my way through a class discussion. Seven hours later, I read the last sentence, closed the book, and exhaled for the first time since reading the first sentence. It remains the most moving novel I have ever read.
Silence by Shusaku Endo tells the story of a young Jesuit missionary sent to seventeenth-century Japan during a time of intense persecution for Christians. Rumor has it the young Jesuit’s mentor has apostatized, so he travels to Japan in search of the truth. The truth proves elusive and along the way we are confronted with the nagging problem of the silence of God. One scene in particular captures the chill when God is silent.
Two poor, peasant Japanese Christians are discovered and sentenced to death. In order to dissuade others from becoming Christians, the authorities make a spectacle of them, tying them to wooden crosses at the edge of the ocean. When the tide rises, the frigid water creeps chin-high—just high enough to ensure a slow death. For two days they hang alone, shivering, crying out, as the inky ocean advances and retreats. Finally, they die.
His whole life this young Jesuit has been told how glorious it is to die for your faith: “I had long read about martyrdom in the lives of the saints—how the souls of the martyrs had gone home to Heaven, how they had been filled with glory in Paradise, how the angels had blown trumpets. This was the splendid martyrdom I had often seen in my dreams.”
But while dreams are pliable, reality is stiff, and as he watches two peasants swallowed up by the sea, no angels blare heavenly trumpets. There is nothing. There is silence:
The martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I now describe to you was no such glorious thing. What a miserable and painful business it was! The rain falls unceasingly on the sea. And the sea which killed them surges on uncannily—in silence. . . . What do I want to say? I myself do not quite understand. Only that today, when for the glory of God Mokichi and Ichizo moaned, suffered and died, I cannot bear the monotonous sound of the dark sea gnawing at the shore. Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God . . . the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.
I have seen a saint breathe his last breath, and it was not glorious. I heard no trumpets. It was miserable, and I heard nothing. According to the psalmist, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His godly ones” (Psalm 116:15). Be that as it may, I cannot always catch a view of things from behind the eyes of God, and if you’ve ever watched a human die, then your romantic notions of angels and trumpets have likely been buried beneath the miserable, painful business of death. But if you won’t take it from me (or a fictional Jesuit missionary), perhaps you’ll take it from a saint.
Most know Mother Teresa as a rock of faith who spent her entire life serving the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta; that is all true, but it’s not all the truth. For much of her adult life, she dealt with terrible spiritual darkness and depression. Her private letters reveal a saint of stunning light and blinding darkness:
Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me.—When the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long for God—and then it is that I feel—He does not want me—He is not there.—Heaven—souls—why these are just words—which mean nothing to me.—My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls—to go where?—Why all this? Where is the soul in my very being? God does not want me.—Sometimes—I just hear my own heart cry out—“My God” and nothing else comes.—The torture and pain I can’t explain.—From my childhood I have had a most tender love for Jesus . . . but this too has gone.—I feel nothing before Jesus. . . . You see, Father, the contradiction in my life. I long for God—I want to love Him—to love Him much . . . and yet there is but pain—longing and no love.
Mother Teresa was most certainly a saint, but she was a saint who knew what it was like to take a long walk alone in the dark. Because that’s what faith is at times, even for saints.
I am not much of a saint, but I am a pastor. And sometimes I have a gnawing, resentful sense that I am pouring my heart out, trying to convince people of the truthfulness of the faith, all because God cannot be bothered to say the smallest word on his own behalf. I feel like I am doing for God what God refuses to do for himself.
And so, God, why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Why do your rod and staff not always comfort us as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death? To be clear, God, we’re not asking to get out of life alive—we’re just asking why you don’t do more than the nothing you often seem to be doing when we need you the most. Why are you so silent?
This might be a question we must learn to live with instead of answer, so here are two thoughts that have helped me live with it a bit more faithfully.
Trait negativity bias refers to a human tendency “to pay more attention and place more value on negative information than positive information.” It means our brains are literally wired to focus on negative things instead of positive things, that “negative information weighs more heavily on the brain.” It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective (no need to pay much attention to the neighbor who likes you when the real threat to your survival is the neighbor who despises you), and it is quite obviously true.
Why can a billion bits of good news fail to move your pulse a beat but a single bit of bad news send it racing? Trait negativity bias. Why can one poor interaction with someone outweigh a hundred favorable interactions? Trait negativity bias. Why can one jerk ruin the party for everyone else? Trait negativity bias. Why do you forget the thirty sermons you loved but will never, ever forget that one sermon you really disagreed with? Trait negativity bias.
I know you don’t mean to, but you don’t have to mean to. We do it intuitively, subconsciously. It’s a reflex.
When I was twenty-three, I was the camp pastor at a summer youth camp in North Carolina. It was a great summer and one of my favorite parts of each session was receiving feedback from the youth pastors and leaders during our end-of-session evaluations. Like most humans I know, I like it when people say nice things about me, so I enjoyed reading through the evaluations and hearing how good a job I had done. But a reckoning was in route.
A group showed up, and we did not get along. These things happen from time to time, and it’s nobody’s fault. Chalk it up to different upbringings or personalities; you weren’t meant to be best friends, so just try to be civil. We tried but failed and so by the end of the week a mutual hostility had emerged, and they let me have it in my end-of-session evaluation. The length of their list of grievances was surpassed only by its creativity.
One felt my sermons were too long.
One felt my sermons were too short.
One felt I was too arrogant. (Fair enough. I was twenty-three.)
One said I had egregiously indulged my ego and inflicted an intolerable burden on the students by inviting them to say “howdy” to me whenever they saw me. (New Yorkers don’t find Texas charm very charming.)
One said he hated my accent.
One said she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she just found me unlikable.
Had I been arrogant? Absolutely. Dead to rights. But the level of venom was so petty that I knew it shouldn’t bother me. So I kept a strong, straight face as we finished the evaluations, confidently strolled back to my room, closed the door, and immediately fell into a pit of existential despair, questioning everything I thought I knew about God and my place in the universe.
“They’re right. I’m the worst person in the world. I simultaneously preach too long and not long enough. I must develop a different accent. Everybody except my mother hates me. Wait—does my mother hate me?”
I know this trite misfortune should not have crushed me, and I hate that I even remember this story, but to this day I cannot remember a single one of the positive evaluations I received that summer, although I can remember every single word of the one negative evaluation.
My church recently endured a painful season of loss, and at a staff meeting we took time to talk through it—marriages that were lost or lapsing, children who were sick, children who had died. And as we sat with it all, a heavy sadness weighed on the room, and there was an unspoken sense of why—why wasn’t God doing more; why wasn’t God helping more; why was God so silent?
Eventually, someone said something: “These broken marriages and sick children are very sad, but as we mourn them we can’t forget all the healthy marriages and all the healthy children.” And it was like a light switched on, because while the sadness was still sad and real, we were reminded that even in midnight hours, God had done so much for us. We have so many healthy marriages, and so many healthy children, and so many children who are not healthy, but they are showered with love, and so many marriages that are limping along, but people are pushing through with moxie and forgiveness.
But we have a troubling tendency to take all the good things for granted. We feel entitled to them. We obsess over why bad things happen but rarely wonder why good things happen. Our sense of entitlement makes it hard to remember the universe does not owe us good things any more than it owes us bad things. Some of this is our faith’s fault. Its breathtaking promises of eternal light and love heighten our awareness of bad things to the point that we often forget light and love are not our due. They are a gift.
All of this to say, why is God so silent sometimes? Why doesn’t God do more? Perhaps God isn’t silent but is doing something, yet we lack the ears to hear and the eyes to see. A loved one dies and we wonder why God did nothing. A loved one gets better and we’re grateful the medicine worked. I don’t think God needs us to conjure up excuses for him, but I imagine being God comes with its own divine set of problems—being blamed for every perceived failure to act but never much thanked for the billions of unforeseen mercies that sustain every single thing, every single day, sun up to sun down.
My wife went through a difficult season of doubt a couple of years ago, and in a moment of poignant honesty blurted out, “Why would I pray about this when God has never answered a single prayer of mine?” Having asked it numerous times myself, I was very sympathetic to her question, so we talked about it a bit. Could she think of a single answered prayer?
Well, there was her brother. For a couple of years we had prayed for him—that he’d find a wife who would love him for who he is but help ground him; that his infectious love for life could be channeled into a vibrant love for others. And now he was engaged to a wonderful woman who loved him dearly but was strong enough to set him straight when need be, and he had become remarkably more responsible and attentive to the needs of those around him. Was this an answered prayer or just a coincidence?
I suppose the rather obvious answer is that it could be either, and such is the case with every single attempt to document an “answered prayer.” God could be doing many things, or God could be doing nothing, and yet it would all look about the same to us because our eyes target and our ears are tuned in to the tragic. He who has ears, let him hear.
That’s my first thought; here’s my second.
In Matthew 7:7-11, Jesus compares us to children and God to a good father, the point being that if even human parents desire to give their children what is good, how much more does God? This got me to thinking.
I am far from a perfect father, but I love my little boy, and there’s not one good thing in this world I would willingly withhold from him. If it’s good, I want it for him. But believe it or not, that is not always entirely clear to my son.
Last week, I took him to the park. It was a beautiful day and one of those moments I’d often looked forward to before he was born—a dad and his boy and a leisurely morning spent cavorting and getting into trouble together. Like most small boys, my son loves playing with a basketball, so we brought one along.
My eighteen-month-old son knows how to say please. He knows that when he wants something, he needs to say please.
When we arrive at the park, he runs around smiling from ear to ear, and I start dribbling the basketball on the court. This gets his attention, and he scurries over and tries to grab the ball. I gently remind him that if he wants the ball, he needs to say please. This makes him want the ball even more, so he franticly babbles, “Ball, ball, ball!” I hold on to the ball and ask him to say please. He composes himself and once again says, “Ball.” Stubborn boy, but he comes by it honestly, so I say, “Wyatt, I know you want this ball, and I want to give you this ball, but you have to say please first.”
And my eighteen-month-old son looks me in the eyes, sticks his eighteen-month-old finger in my chest and says, “Ball.” Gauntlet thrown.
So I scoop up the basketball and say, “No please; no ball.” And he furrows his little brow, screams at the top of his little lungs, and marches his stubborn little butt to the farthest corner of the park where he stares daggers at me for the next thirty minutes. I had a thirty-minute standoff with my toddler over please and a basketball.
I trust it goes without saying that I wanted to give him the basketball. Nothing would have made me happier. But I also wanted him to learn to say please, to learn to receive things instead of always taking things. All of this is perfectly clear to me, and I expect to you too, but it is not to my son. His little eighteen-month-old brain cannot understand Dad’s obscure moral teleology.
And I think we can all agree that the difference between God and me is at least as great as the difference between Wyatt and me, that the cognitive gap between the creator of spacetime and a thirty-year-old dad is at least as vast as the chasm between a thirty-year-old dad and his eighteen-month-old son (go ahead, agree; it won’t hurt my feelings). So if my son cannot begin to comprehend some of my ways (and I lack a single created universe to my credit), why should I think I can even begin to comprehend all of God’s ways?
I understand this might sound like an artful dodge, but given our terms, I think I’m playing fair and am making a rather bare logical observation. Because if there is a God who is the maker and sustainer of this wild ride we call existence, then it makes sense that much of life will not make sense to us. I realize I’m begging the question a bit, but sometimes you have to so you can get into the question and see what things look like from the inside. And while we are perfectly free to register our complaints with the authorities, it’s tough to see where we could possibly get the leverage needed to pry God off the throne and place ourselves on it. Such is the life of an ant on a rollercoaster.
God knows our pain is real, and the godforsaken silence can be deafening. God knows it can be too much sometimes, and God bless those who can’t hang on long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel is redemption instead of a train.
My God, my God—why the silence when all I’m asking for is a whisper?
You are neither the first nor the last to ask it, and as Mother Teresa said, sometimes all you can do is ask it and then “stand like a very small child and wait patiently for the storm to subside.” And as you ask and wait, Christ waits with you. Christ hangs with you. Because if there’s anyone who knows what it’s like to feel forsaken by God, it’s Christ.